GREV - The New Way to Work (Lesson)
The New Way to Work
From the Scientific Revolution, Europeans learned new techniques in agriculture. These new techniques improved water drainage from fields, allowed for larger livestock herds, and provided better cultivation practices. By rotating crops between different fields, farmers added to the nutrients in their soil. By fencing public lands, known as enclosure, Great Britain (in particular) transformed farming from peasant agriculture to commercial agriculture. With the introduction of new foods from overseas, Europeans planted high yield crops like corn and potatoes. And with the invention of new agricultural machines, farmers plowed, seeded, reaped and fertilized more efficiently than ever before. All of this led to a food revolution in northwest Europe—but it also led to a societal revolution that freed former farming hands for other jobs.
The Industrial Revolution began in the mid-18th Century in Great Britain as a result of a gradual accumulation of technical knowledge. But it was put into effect due to the food revolution that created a population boom at a time when fewer hands were needed to grow the food. These hands went in search of new occupations. They left their farms and started to move into cities. There they took jobs in new industries and transformed the way people worked, the way people lived, the way governments governed, and the way the economy grew.
The Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution took all of the thoughts about the process of discovery, learning, evaluating and understanding the natural world from the Scientific Revolution and applied that knowledge. The result was a time period of extraordinary inventions that remodeled the way manufactured goods came into being along with the services those goods provided.
Before the Industrial Revolution, manufactured goods came from individuals living at home in the "domestic system." Under the "domestic system," middlemen traveled the countryside dropping off raw materials at individual homes. There, workers (mostly women) converted the raw materials into the manufactured products. Then, the middlemen would return, pick up the products and sell them to larger merchants that transported the products around the world. The best example of this type of industrial system involved the textile industry. Middlemen dropped off the cotton or wool at a home and returned to pick up the woven cloth used to make clothes, sails, linens—well, everything that cloth is used for. But each step in the process took a great deal of time; therefore, inventors applied the scientific method to create machines that would speed up each step.
As you can see from this graphic organizer, the invention of the Flying Shuttle meant that women could weave thread into cloth much faster than before—the new speed increased the demand for thread. Therefore, the Spinning Jenny came along to increase the speed by which thread could be made in order to keep up with the pace of the Flying Shuttle. Of course, without cotton, the thread could not be made. Therefore, the Cotton Gin came along to increase the speed by which cotton could be gathered and processed...it's a formula in logic...if you have this, then you need that. And the Industrial Revolution provided the "thats." But all of this took time—look at the dates for these inventions—decades passed. And still, the "domestic system" continued as all of these inventions could be used within the home. So, what transformed the textile industry from a "domestic system" to a commercial one?
Water transformed the textile industry—and all of the other industries as well. But first, inventors needed to find a way to take this element that covered two-thirds of the world's surface and convert it into power. This took a long while and a lot of people...
Newcomen (or Atmospheric) Engine
In the early 1700s, Thomas Newcomen invented a fairly inefficient steam engine that boiled water (blue in this illustration) and harnessed the rising steam (pink in this illustration) to move a machine's parts. It burned coal to heat the water and it caught the rising steam in a cylinder. The propulsion of the steam within the cylinder moved the machine parts. Newcomen's design improved upon the designs of earlier inventors and hundreds of his engines were built during his lifetime—mostly to be used to pump water out of coal mines. But the Newcomen Engine was very inefficient—its design allowed a lot of heat to be lost which led to a great deal of coal burning that didn't match its output. Therefore, later inventors continued to study the Newcomen Engine in an attempt to improve upon it (just as Newcomen, himself, had done with previous experiments.)
Decades passed until finally, in the 1770s, an inventor turned...
That inventor was James Watt (with funding from his business partner, Matthew Boulton.) Using Boulton's money and Watt's mind, the two men created the Watt Steam Engine (sometimes known as the Boulton and Watt Steam Engine.) The new invention more than doubled the efficiency of the Newcomen Engine and allowed for new applications to the steam engine. No longer did mills need to rely on power drafted from horses or water wheels. This new power source led to new inventions within various industries and these industries were transformed.
The alliance between inventor and investor that worked so well in creating the Watt (or Boulton and Watt) Steam Engine restructured everything—from business models to transportation and communication to manufacturing and social structure. In 1807 CE, Robert Fulton built the first steamship. In the 1820s, George Stephenson introduced the first steam-powered locomotive. In 1837 CE, Robert Morse sent a message on the telegraph. In 1876 CE, Alexander Graham Bell made a phone call. In 1879 CE, Thomas Edison lit up a dark room. In the late 1800s, the Eastman-Kodak company quickened the pace of picture-taking (what would they think of the selfie?), Gottlieb Daimler drove off in a car with an internal combustible engine (what would he think of NASCAR?), and Guglielmo Marconi talked through his radio (what would he make of texting?).
Social Structure
Once the steam engine transformed the textile industry, it was obvious that it could restructure other industries as well. No longer dependent on a water wheel for power, mills and factories could be built in urban locations where people were more plentiful. Urban locations with factories, in turn, attracted even more people. The Industrial Revolution urbanized Great Britain first and then other nations as it spread. In 1800 CE, there were only twenty cities in Europe that had a population of more than 100,000. Two of the three largest cities in the world were located in China at that time—not Europe. By 1900 CE, that statistic was old news. By then, there were one hundred-fifty cities in Europe with populations over 100,000—London actually had six million people. And nine of the ten largest cities in the world were located in Europe and the United States.
On the global stage, wherever the Industrial Revolution took hold, that city or nation propelled past its rivals and rose within the global economic order. On the local stage, whoever controlled the means of the Industrial Revolution propelled past other individuals and rose within the socioeconomic order. Industrialization brought about new social classes within the cities and nations.
The Industrial Revolution also restructured market systems. Before, European monarchies studied markets closely to protect their mercantilist systems of economy. After the Industrial Revolution, economic prosperity came increasingly from private ownership of the means of production in a free-market system known as capitalism. In this sense, the Industrial Revolution set in motion Adam Smiths Enlightenment argument that economic growth should come from the removal of government intervention within the economy. His concept of a free-market system was based on individuals owning the means of production and selling their products or services in a free or open market where demand set the price for the goods rather than the king or the government.
However, this concept did not take into account the social changes that arrived on the heels of the Industrial Revolution.
The abuses and consequences of the Industrial Revolution were quite clear by the second half of the 19th Century—especially in Great Britain which had been in its throes the longest—and resulted in protests of the new order.
- In literature—Authors like Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and George Eliot penned novels detailing the hardships of factory workers. You might recognize a couple of their titles—Hard Times, Silas Marner.
- At work—Labor unions formed to represent thousands of factory workers in negotiations to improve better working conditions.
- In politics—Activists like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels authored books and pamphlets denouncing the exploitation of workers and calling for an economic restructuring of wealth and ownership.
- At home—As the traditional role of middle-class women changed from helping their families earn incomes to more domestic duties designed to exhibit new wealth, these women started to organize and form societies to push for more equal political rights.
- On the streets—Skilled artisans left jobless as machines took over their crafts stormed factories and destroyed equipment, as in Great Britain's Luddite Movement, to protest pitiful working conditions and wages.
- On boats—Unprecedented numbers of Europeans decided to walk away from the new social order. Emigration out of Europe peaked as potential workers sailed to North and South America in search of better lives.
At first, the institutions with the most power ignored the outcries for reform. Instead, the government, churches, courts and police sided with the status quo and worked to quell calls for reform. Between 1811 and 1816 CE, for example, police arrested protesters of the Luddite Movement and the courts passed sentences of executions to prevent future outbursts. But as the protests grew more widespread and loud, even these institutions could no longer ignore the popular push for change.
By the mid-19th Century, two schools of thought arose over how best to address the negative consequences of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism.
Those who decided that the Free Market system was still good argued to make reforms within capitalism. They tended to live within nations like Great Britain and the United States where the impact of the Enlightenment had been the strongest, the middle class had grown the most and democracy had been the most successful. Those who decided that the Free Market system was a disaster and needed to be replaced tended to live within nations like Russia that still had strong absolute governments and an extremely oppressed peasant class. (Of course, examples of both thoughts could be found anywhere—but these tendencies based on location and experience were very prevalent and also very important with regards to the future.)
Among those nations with a population looking to improve capitalism from within, government intervention on the behalf of workers and the environment took root. For example, the British Parliament enacted limits on the number of work hours allowed per day per person, placed minimum age limits on workers (to restrict child labor,) and set regulations on cleanliness and safety to improve working conditions within factories in its Factory Act of 1883. Also, factory owners implemented their own reforms as they came to realize that a healthy, happy, well-paid workforce was more productive and brought in more profit. However, among those nations still ruled by an absolute government, Marxist ideals of a complete economic overhaul took root. For example, in Russia a new political party emerged—the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party—with the intent to unite the various factions of protest into one voice.
Recap Section
Watch the videos below to review what you've learned.
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